‘Scream Queens’ Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Ghost Stories’

Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Ghost Stories’

Sorry this recap is late. For the past 12 hours I’ve been frantically trying to lock down the marketing rights for red and blue toilet paper.

It was a high-revelation, high-body-count night on “Scream Queens” Tuesday, with Niecy Nash and Nick Jonas both getting a lot of work and responding with Emmy Award-winning performances. Well, maybe not, but they were darned entertaining. Not sure if Mr. Jonas will be back after taking that knife to the torso late in the episode, but who knows; his character, Boone, had already been dead once before.

As everyone prepared to scatter for Thanksgiving break, Denise assured the girls that the best way to calm fears was to tell ghost stories. She related a couple of doozies, several of them making going to the bathroom an exercise in terror. One, involving a choice between red and blue toilet paper, is a merchandizing opportunity waiting to be seized, if it hasn’t been already. What fan of this show wouldn’t be thrilled to see a toilet-paper-shaped package under the Christmas tree?

While the ghost stories were flying, Boone, who everyone thought was dead, shed his Joaquin Phoenix disguise and appeared to assorted other characters, the denser ones assuming he was a ghost. Best moment of the episode: When he dropped in on Zayday and tried to seduce her.

Her: “Nice shirt.”

Him: “You know what it’s made out of? Boyfriend material.”

We learned too much to list in this episode, but here’s the Top 3.

1. Chad minored in luggage sciences.

2. Chad impregnated Hester, or thinks he did.

3. There were indeed two babies born in the bathtub, a boy and a girl. Boone was apparently one, and was also one of the Red Devils. His sister, still unrevealed, is apparently the other. In this episode he thought the two of them were going to murder Gigi, their surrogate mother, but instead the sister turned the knife on her brother.

Some serious killing went down on Tuesday. Earl Grey: dead. Random truck driver: dead. Boone: dead. Hester, pushed down the stairs by Chanel: apparently dead. There was the cracking sound of a neck breaking but I don’t recall anyone checking her pulse, so who knows?

In any case, the show, so uneven at first, is really finding a groove. Now who wants to buy some toilet paper?